New Pregnancy Help Report Shows Major Service Growth

By: Chuck Donovan, originally published December 1, 2025, The Washington Stand

The latest report on the work of pregnancy care centers is out from the Charlotte Lozier Institute (CLI), and it is the most encouraging yet. Titled “Pregnancy Centers: Rising to the Occasion with Unwavering Care,” the research concludes that 2,775 of these life-affirming centers provided over $452 million worth of medical care, education, and material support to women, babies, and families in 2024. Medical professionals associated with the centers now number more than 10,000 women and men, and the centers saw more than 1,000,000 new clients for support, care, and counsel.

An article published here last week lays out more details of the CLI-directed survey, the sixth of its kind published since 2009. The report represents a unique collaboration of pro-life service providers across the United States. Contributors besides CLI include Heartbeat International, CareNet, Focus on the Family’s Option Ultrasound Program, and center coalition leaders in the states. The history of the report is interesting and offers a model for future efforts to protect babies and their mothers in a culturally hostile moment.

The first pregnancy center report was published by Family Research Council in the first year of the Obama administration. Its title was “A Passion to Serve, a Vision for Life: Pregnancy Resource Center Service Report 2009.” The report was produced by FRC after a meeting of pregnancy center leaders identified the utility of combining information from their center networks to demonstrate the breadth of their efforts. The report authors were keenly aware of the annual reports released by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PPFA), which detailed their total clients and service numbers, including a steadily growing toll of abortions. The PPFA reports consistently yielded sizable numbers, secured thanks to the affiliation structure of PPFA and a uniform reporting system managed by a special affiliate. The pregnancy center movement, in contrast, although it had been in existence for nearly four decades, was more diffuse and had never combined data about its accomplishments, impressive though they proved to be.

FRC produced the report in the face of significant challenges. The various networks in existence at that time did not generally produce national totals for service reports. FRC staff members, some of whom continued to contribute to later reports, were forced to rely on an array of documents obtained from individual centers and from Internal Revenue Service Forms 990s. The latter contained audited numbers on personnel and finances and service provision but suffered from a lack of detail and varying fiscal year end-dates. The process led to a significant amount of estimation. In turn, this report included valuable historical information on the founding of pregnancy held centers prior to the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. Even more important, the 2009 report created a mode of cooperation that has only deepened with each report, bringing in new centers and leading to ever-stronger reports on what now assuredly stands as one of the most effective nonprofit movements in the nation’s history.

FRC was also the issuing organization for the second national PHC report, released in 2011. It was likewise named “A Passion to Serve,” with the subtitle, “How Pregnancy Centers Empower Women, Help Families, and Strengthen Communities.” The report tabulated the results from 1,969 PHCs for 2010, relying on data from CareNet, Heartbeat International, and the National Institute of Family and Life Advocates, the three largest U.S. networks. As subsequent reports did with increasing detail, the second edition estimated the public cost savings emerging from the private, free-to-the-client services rendered to PHC patients. The estimate for all services was $108.9 million, with more than two-thirds of the savings due to free patient consultations and free ultrasounds. The total number of people served exceeded 2.3 million. The value of services performed by PHC employees and their 71,000 volunteers, including medical professionals, was calculated based on then-current federal data for social agency employees and other national sources.

After the second edition, a hiatus of several years occurred in the conduct of analyses and release of reports. Then, at mid-decade, Family Research Council President Tony Perkins generously granted permission to the Charlotte Lozier Institute to carry on the PHC report tradition. Rechristened “A Legacy of Life and Love,” the third edition in the series was researched and written by former FRC staff member Moira Gaul, MPH, with new support from statistics expert Mai Bean, a CLI associate scholar. It should be noted that nationally recognized scholar Michael J. New, Ph.D. has contributed enormously to these works, responding to the challenges of synthesizing accurate data across organizational practices. Appearing a decade after “A Passion to Serve,” the third edition — called “A Half Century of Hope” — benefited from vastly improved data collection by the national center groups and increasing participation by smaller PHC networks that fill a variety of important roles in the center matrix.

The report’s findings demonstrated continued progress. All told, 2,600 centers responded via online surveys, allowing calculations that the centers provided nearly 2,000,000 women and youth with free services with an estimated community cost savings of $161 million in 2017. Released in 2018, the report confirmed a pattern of service expansion as the PHCs increased their range, adding post-abortion counseling; sexually transmitted disease testing and, in many instances, treatment; abortion pill reversal; and community referrals for employment training, housing issues and drug treatment. The report also described the lay/health professional volunteer mix, identifying an estimated 7,500 medical professionals alongside approximately 67,400 volunteers.

Since the third edition, Charlotte Lozier Institute, the research and education arm of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, has maintained a schedule of releasing reports roughly every two years. They include:

• 2020: “Pregnancy Centers Stand the Test of Time.” The report shows the centers once more served nearly 2,000,000 clients via some 2,700 centers, providing services with an estimated value of nearly $270 million. Former CareNet general counsel Jeanneane Maxon joined the report team, bringing invaluable expertise to technical and legal questions addressed by the report.
• 2022: “Hope for a New Generation.” This report was issued in the wake of the landmark Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Center. The report drew on information garnered from some 2,750 PHCs. It documented how the centers responded to increasing demand in the midst of the COVID epidemic and the stresses it imposed on health care systems. Using a modified metric, “Hope for a New Generation” found that centers conducted in-person and online visits on nearly 3.26 million occasions, providing health, education, and material services worth nearly $368 million in 2022.
• 2025: “Rising to the Occasion with Unwavering Care.” This most recent report, released on November 15, 2025, and described above, shows the levels of support from the nation’s PHCs rising yet again — to some $452 million in services.

Viewing these reports in summary, it is clear that life-affirming pregnancy care continues to advance, a counterweight to an admittedly challenging national picture in which roughly a million unborn lives per year are still lost to abortion. Sadly, among these challenges are continuing efforts by abortion activists and a handful of state and federal legislators to impede or block PHCs from carrying out their mission to serve mothers by protecting them and their children. This, despite one of the most arresting statistics of all, a constant in the FRC/CLI survey and other literature, showing patient satisfaction persistently high and reaching a record 98% in the most recent reporting period.

Despite numbers like these and the additional fact that PHCs tend to reduce rather than increase reliance on taxpayer funding, the centers continue to suffer attacks from forces that seek to compromise their life-affirming character and conscientious commitment to professional standards in the information and resources they share. The most recent example is a case now pending before the U.S. Supreme Court wherein a group of New Jersey pregnancy centers is attempting to protect itself from a state subpoena seeking certain records, including donor information, whose privacy is generally protected by law on First Amendment grounds. Meanwhile. the Attorney General of California, Rob Bonta (D), continues his lawsuit against pro-life pregnancy help centers in California that offer women the choice to use natural progesterone to reverse abortions induced with the drug mifepristone. Attorneys for Heartbeat International at the Thomas More Society recently succeeded in persuading an Illinois court to uphold a demand for key documents on abortion pill reversal from the pro-abortion American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG).

These actions against pregnancy help centers are relentless and a costly distraction from the truth. Pregnancy centers offer meaningful and effective alternatives to abortion, and they make clear that this is their mission. They do not offer procedures that they believe are inimical to individual and social well-being. The services and support they offer are almost uniformly agreeable to women, who praise and welcome those services irrespective of their views on the permissibility of abortion. As the latest report in the “Legacy of Life and Love” series shows once more, women and communities nationwide support genuine providers of life-affirming choice.

Chuck Donovan served in the Reagan White House as a senior writer and as Deputy Director of Presidential Correspondence until early 1989. He was executive vice president of Family Research Council, a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation, and founder/president of Charlotte Lozier Institute from 2011 to 2024. He has written and spoken extensively on issues in life and family policy.